I just discovered that how I make coffee and Frappuccinos taste exactly the same at room temperature. I feel like I owe myself $8000 now, approximately.
@alphabet Yes. But I only earn meagre amounts now, because I translate a page with simple text a whole day. I have a friend who publishes in foreign journals, and he makes orders sometimes. He is not in a hurry, unlike all commercial clients.
My brain is not working.
@M.A.R. I'm taking a drug for hypertension, so it's about 100/70 :)
Or 110/80, if I halve the dose.
I record everything I do, to force myself to do something, but still my brain does not work.
I'm not sure there are stronger means than venlafaxine.
What do you get when you cross a cop and a skunk? Law and odor
There's a nice story by O.Henry by that title. Law and Order, in which one cop in a small town is responsible for Law, and the other, for Order. When I read his stories in Russian as a kid, they seemed dull. In English, they are brilliant, because of the completely untranslateable wordplay.
I've been listening to a doomer podcast, and one expert there thinks that democracy may crash across the globe, because it takes a lot of expensive societal structuring, and we are running out of cheap energy, so the 'excessive' structures may start crumbling.
The expert is not some crackhead, but a reputable researcher. He does not call for hiding in the woods and stuff.
What if the war in Ukraine is the first large conflict in a long, hard series?
Like the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman world.
> Made desperate by economic necessity, many of these former city dwellers, as well as many small farmers, were forced to give up hard-earned basic civil rights in order to receive protection from large land-holders. In doing so, they became a half-free class of Roman citizen known as coloni. They were tied to the land, and in later Imperial law, their status was made hereditary. This provided an early model for serfdom, the origins of medieval feudal society
If the gurus on the doomer podcast are to be believed, it's better to hike those prices to the sky, and transition to the use of rail transport, because humanity won't have the time and money to do it later, when the crisis really hits.
They laugh at the transition to electric cars. One said something like it's placing an electric motor on a Titanic.
Is Bonza Bottler Day the “word” you’re looking for? My 2nd grade teacher introduced me to this celebration and it has stuck with me for over two decades now.
According to the Bonza Bottler Day website:
Bonza Bottler Day is celebrated once a month when the number of the month coincides with the n...
@CowperKettle As with most linguistic maps, if you squint it's mostly OK, but in many of the details it seems... not right?
Like first of all it gives space in the interior for sparsely or un- inhabited desert. But then it assigns some language to a lot of those areas, but they are just as sparsely inhabited as the unassigned areas. Be consistent!
I guess the areas that are Kurdish, Azeri, Gilaki, Mazandaran, and Turkoman are mostly in the right place and one could quibble about the actual contours. But really those places are bilingual... you don't just cross a boundary line and all of a sudden what are these people -saying-?
And all these little dots of Dari and Turkmen and Arabic and Azeri fully within the interior (even assuming it's not total uninhabitable desert)... are those totally enclosed enclaves, or, what is more likely, there might be an increased size of them as a subpopulation, but it's going to be mostly Persian speakers.
Or I could be totally wrong and there's a big swath in the east of Kurdish and Turkmen speakers separated from their main cohort in the west and north respectively.
what do you think @M.A.R.?
@alphabet I agree with you motivation - I think some people are misguided in their reasons for voting to close and they do it too easily. But...
But using the term 'badness' on a measure that includes a lot of other people who are not so liberal with their close votes on various (to my eyes) -obviously- on-topic questions... well, 'badness' is not a good term for that. At all. It demonizes a lot of people. Even those who I agree should stop doing what they're doing so much.
@CowperKettle Funny typo in the French title. It should have been Vacances de l'amour (Vacation on love) while the singular Vacance de l'amour is dubious, meaning something like "Lack of love", "A situation where love is precluded", maybe "love vacancy".
Here are some suggestions: 'aggressive down-voters' (this would leave out people who have a high measure but don't vote to close that often, just get overturned in a high percentage.
"closing factual questions as 'opinion based' because they don't like the question/don't know"
(OK that is also demonizing/presumptive... I'm just throwing out things)
ok badness is bad.
How about just 'aggressive'? Probably should just go on count of close-votes. not even ratio? maybe a ratio.
@jlliagre That has motivated me to write a French novel with 'Vacance de l'Amour' as the title.
A couple goes on vacation and...
oh.. that's a sad novel.
How about instead 'Vacance des Idées'?
It's the one where Mr. Bean goes on vacation to Nice and accidentally becomes a speaker at an academic convention of psychoanalysts.
Hm... I think I've seen that one already.
Or how about Fast and Furious XIII: Vacance d'Huile de Moteur
I'm pretty sure there's no plot (did the other ones have one?) but there's an explosion and there's a car chase and they drive to the top of Mt Everest and it explodes like a volcano and it's really cool and there's a 5 second scene where one car's oil light comes on in, just to justify the title.
@Mitch Vacance is however odd because it usually refers to positions, not something like love, ideas or oil. It is commonly used in expressions like vacance du pouvoir, vacance de la présidence, vacance des postes à pourvoir.
Unrelated to the interesting topic about pee-pee and wee-wee respective meanings a few days ago, Pee-Wee Herman passed away yesterday.
@Mitch Most single number statistics are going to be reductive, and so is the term "badness" but it's so obviously reductive that I personally find it apt. Maybe I'm just able to see the tone (behind the term at least) as lighthearted
@jlliagre Not only that, the man was arrested for touching his pee-wee in a theater in the 90s
@jlliagre You can't rely on the Japanese to get anything right in 外来語 (gairaigo, "foreign words"). They'll trim and change whatever suits them, and then wonder why foreign speakers don't understand.
@jlliagre Now historians will be able to pinpoint the exact point in time in which my chances of a Nobel prize in literature were ruined. Thanks. A lot.
OK how about 'Vacance(s) du Président' where there's a coup when the president goes on vacation?
@jlliagre Strangely enough the adjective 'peewee' just means 'something (usually a person) who is young and very small'. eg 'peewee football' (American football) is football for little kids like 5 years old.
And the nickname 'Peewee' (not a real name) is just sort of diminutive, probably the smallest member of a group of friends, and has no (or extremely little connotation to share with 'pee pee' -or- 'wee wee'.
@Laurel ok. I guess it doesn't say exactly how someone is bad and I wish it were more specific.
@Mitch I think it's measuring close votes that were overturned without an intervening edit. (Due to the limitations of SEDE there's no way to track aged away votes unfortunately.) The query went through several iterations tho
Downvotes are anonymous to mods (except we have some details wrt serial voting against specific people) so there's no way to really go after aggressive downvoters btw
@Mitch You can still compete for the Nobel Peace Prize. I know this one is close to your heart! As a reminder, their selection is based on the following points : för folkens förbrödring, för avskaffande eller minskning av de stående härarna och för åstadkommande av fredskongresser.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…